I hope that these two things don’t sound terrible together, but I really loved this book and at times it felt as if I had written it. No, that definitely looks even worse written down.

“I gotta poo,” yelled Lieutenant Simon Wlodarski at the top of his lungs, hunkered down in the ruins of some forgotten city. Even with the mortar rounds flying overhead, he caught me snickering at him and quickly added, “God, I hate that acronym.”

“Poo” is [American] military jargon for “Point Of Origin”. It is called out by a spotter—usually one slightly less self-conscious than the marines reservist officer I was lying face down with in the half-buried ruins of an Akkadian city, around thirty miles south of Baghdad—to indicate where indirect fire is coming from.